The author

I was about to review this book when I was informed of the death of Colin Latchem, its author.

Colin was an Australian consultant, researcher and writer in the field of open and distance learning. In the 1970s, he was a pioneer in the UK in the development of educational television and learning resources for universities.

He emigrated to Australia in 1982 to become head of the Teaching Learning Group at Curtin University, Perth, a centre responsible for academic staff development, educational technology and open and distance learning. Over the years he became the ‘go-to’ person about open and distance education in South East Asia. He received the Charles A Wedemeyer award in 2002 for best book of the year on open and distance education. He was also co-editor of the SpringerBriefs series on Open and Distance Education. He was formerly the Asia-Pacific Corresponding Editor of The British Journal of Educational Technology.

Colin was a good friend and colleague whom I have known for over 40 years. I cannot think of a more appropriate way to celebrate a true scholar and gentleman than to review his final work.

Definition of open and distance non-formal education (ODL NFE)

Latchem does not provide a precise definition of non-formal education, but distinguishes non-formal learning from informal learning (the spontaneous, incidental acquisition of knowledge) and formal learning provided by schools, colleges and universities. Non-formal learning sits somewhere in between, concerned with providing lifelong learning in support of social equality, employment and development for those denied formal education. It may be provided through NGOs, international or government agencies, employers or social organisations such as community groups.

In open and distance education most of the teaching is conducted by some provider removed in time and space from the learner, using content and approaches that are openly accessible, enabling learners to learn individually or collaboratively at the time and place of their choosing.

The importance of open and distance education for non-formal education

Some of the figures Latchem provides about the need for non-formal education are staggering:

263 million children and youth did not have access to schools in 2014

130 million girls are denied the right to formal education, and are four times more likely to be denied education than boys of the same socio-economic group

758 million adults aged 15 years and older remain illiterate, of which two-thirds are women

there are 60 million refugees or displaced persons without access to formal education

it would take an extra US$40 billion to provide 12 years of education for all in the developing world, but international aid today is 4% lower than it was in 2010.

Other groups outside the formal education system in developing countries include people with disabilities and people imprisoned. It is of course still the poorest socio-economic groups who have the least access to formal education in developing countries, despite often heroic efforts by national governments.

Latchem argues that conventional face-to-face methods can never meet the scale and extent of the knowledge and skills building and social and behavioural change needed to meet the United Nations’ Millenium Development Goals. Open and distance education non-formal education (ODL NFE) is the only way to meet these needs until formal educational provision becomes globally available to all, and even then ODL NFE will still be needed on a large scale.

However, Latchem claims that there has been little prior research into the effectiveness of ODL NFE in developing countries. What little prior research that has been done indicates that previous attempts to use open and distance learning for non-formal education in developing countries were piecemeal and ineffective, mainly consisting of short-term pilots lacking sustainable funding.

Latchem concluded that a review of current practice and progress in this field was long overdue and hence the central concern of the book is about identifying ways in which open and flexible forms of lifelong learning have increased social equality, employment and development for those denied formal education.

The structure of the book

There are four parts to the book:

Background to the study, which examines the Global Development Agenda, and introduces the reader to prior research, and the main elements of ODL NFE.

A fairly brief description of the main technologies and media currently in use in ODL NFE, including radio, television, mobile learning, OERs and MOOCs, telecentres, and traditional and performing arts.

A more extensive review of areas in which ODL NFE has been mostly successfully used. These include:

out-of-school children and youth

adult literacy, ESL

gender equity

disabled, refugees, prisoners

health care, safe water, sanitation and hygiene

agriculture and agribusiness

small and medium-sized enterprises

education for sustainable development

A conclusion, including actions needed

My main takeaways

Firstly, the size of the challenge in providing education for all. I agree with Latchem that although the long-term goal should be formal education for all, in the short-term this will be impossible for many years in many developing countries, and that non-formal education will continue to be critically important in helping to fill the gap, and that open and distance learning is a valuable, cost-effective means to provide this. (It is also cost-effective means to provide formal education, as well, but that is another book).

Second, though, I was blown away by the many cases Latchem provides of successful ODL NFE projects. The book is filled with over 180 cases and urls to video links which demonstrate the applications. I was particularly impressed by the extent and value of telecentres, and the criteria needed for them to succeed. There are lessons here for developed as well as developing countries.

Third, while cost and access remain a major barrier, I was impressed by the extent to which the Internet and ICTs (particularly mobile learning) are being successfully used in many developing countries. I was also impressed with the use of more traditional media, such as puppets, theatre, song and dance, highlighting the importance of cultural adaptation to local needs. Again I believe there are lessons here for developed as well as developing countries.

Nevertheless, while these success stories are encouraging, there are often systemic difficulties that hinder the implementation of ODL NFE. Latchem identifies the following:

over-dependence on international aid agencies/NGOs

lack of sustainability due to overuse of short-term, small scale pilots and insufficient funding

lack of learning pathways from informal to non-formal to formal education

the need for a systematic approach/a national strategy for non-formal education

lack of reliable broadband connection in rural areas where NFE is most needed

lack of content in local languages

lack of research and evaluation of projects in terms of outcomes.

Latchem then ends with a set of nine action steps that are needed to advance the ODL NFE agenda.

In summary

This book benefits enormously from being written by a single author, rather than a series of articles by different writers. This provides the book with a coherent and consistent message.

I cannot say how thrilled I was to see so many wonderful projects attempting under great difficulty to make the world a better place. Most of these were firmly community-based, and locally designed and maintained, if often with some international assistance. It is one of the most optimistic books I have read for a long while.

It also highlights the naïvity and wrong-headedness of many Western approaches to the use of technology in developing countries, such as believing the importation of American MOOCs (or whatever is the latest technology) is a sustainable solution to education for all. There is a role for MOOCs, but are best developed locally in local languages, for instance, and more importantly, embedded in a local organisation and infrastructure that makes the material likely to be used effectively.

Some of the early content will be familiar to most readers of this blog, but the real target for this book are policy-makers in developing countries trying to tackle the challenge of education for all. This book provides powerful evidence of the role that open and distance education non-formal education can play in making education for all a reality. This is a fitting end to a wonderful career – thank you, Colin.

Contact North | Contact Nord, the organizer and host of the 27thInternational Council for Open and Distance Education (ICDE) World Conference, launches the official portal for the World Conference on Online Learning: Teaching in a Digital Age – Re-Thinking Teaching & Learning to be held in Toronto, Canada from October 17 – 19, 2017. (For an earlier post on ICDE, Contact North, and the conference, click here.)

The theme of the World Conference on Online Learning is Teaching in the Digital Age – Re-Thinking Teaching & Learning with the program focused on five tracks:

Comment

This will be one of the major conferences on online learning in 2017, with participants from all over the world. Even though the conference is targeting a total of 2,000 participants, early registration is recommended (when registration opens) because of the likely number of people wanting to participate from Canada and the USA alone.

Registration will open in October 2016 (sign up for their newsletter to get the exact date).

Declaration of interest: I am a Contact North Research Associate and have been engaged in some of the preliminary planning. If the choice of conference title is familiar, it was not my suggestion, although I have not opposed it.

The EDEN conference

I have just attended the annual conference of the European Distance and E-Learning Network in Budapest, Hungary.

EDEN is one of my favourite conferences because it always has a lot of interesting people attending and it is a quick way for me to stay abreast of what is happening in European online and distance learning. I provide here an overall report on the conference, but I will do a couple of other more detailed posts on the sessions I found particularly interesting.

There were just under 300 participants. My overall impression is that online and open learning are well and strong in Europe, and is now widespread. When I first started to come to EDEN conferences in the early 1990s, there were only two or three main players, but this year there were contributions from almost every European country. With the growth of online and open learning, there are many new people each year joining the field, coming from very diverse backgrounds. EDEN provides a pan-European opportunity to enable newcomers to learn about some of the basic principles and prior research and knowledge in the field, as well as allowing for the sharing of experience and networking, and reporting new trends and developments in online and open learning.

I was the opening keynote speaker, and talked about building effective learning environments, based on my chapter in Teaching in a Digital Age. I also gave the wrap-up to the conference, on which this post is based.

A concert at the Liszt Academy of Music

Policy, planning and management

This year there was a welcome number of contributions that focused on policy and management of online, open and distance learning.

Yves Punie of the European Commission’s Joint Research Centre’s Institute for Prospective Technological Skills reported that 70 million Europeans lacked basic literacy and numeracy skills, 24% had no upper secondary education and 45% have insufficient digital literacy skills, although 90% of jobs in Europe will require some sort of ICT skills. The Institute has developed a list of key digital competencies. He noted that while 21% of universities in Europe are now offering MOOCs, most have no overall strategy for open education.

I was particularly impressed by Melissa Highton’s report on the open learning strategy of Edinburgh University. It is a highly ranked, old research university in Scotland that has aligned its approach to open education to the university’s core mission. She said:

Not being open is a risk and not being open costs us money.

Laureate University is a global private, for-profit university with over one million enrolments, and with campuses in Europe as well as North America. The leadership at Laureate has decided that the whole system will move from largely face-to-face teaching to blended learning. Alan Noghiu described the strategy that is being used and the challenges the organization is facing in implementing the strategy.

information and logistical systems that communicate between all relevant participants in the system;

overall managing for student success.

This seems to me to be a list that proponents of MOOCs should bear in mind, as well as those offering more formal qualifications at a distance.

The use of multimedia and emerging technologies

Susan Aldridge of Drexel University presented some very interesting examples of educational uses of virtual reality, augmented reality, serious games and holography, including examples used in forensic investigation, meteorology, and medicine. One of the augmented reality tools she demonstrated, Aurasma, is free.

Danny Arati of Intel mentioned the University of Nottingham’s The Periodic Table of Videos, where each element in the period table has a short video about it.

The Periodic Table of Videos, University of Nottingham

MOOCs and online learning

I was surprised at how much importance European institutions are still giving to MOOCs. There were by far more papers on MOOCs than on credit-based online learning or even blended learning. Even the Oxford debate this year was on the following motion:

We Should Focus in the Short Term More on MOOCs than on OER

I was relieved when the motion was resoundingly defeated, although I am still a little disheartened that open education is still mainly focused on MOOCs and OERs, rather than on the broader concept of open textbooks, open research, and open data. It was noted that MOOCs are a product while open education is a movement, and it is important not to lose the idea that open education is as much about social justice and equity as it is about technology, as was pointed out by one of the participants, Ronald McIntyre.

Learning analytics

There was an excellent workshop organised by Sally Reynolds and Dai Griffiths from the European Commission funded LACE project: Learning Analytics Community Exchange. The workshop focused on privacy and ethics issues that arise from the use of learning analytics.

Bits and Pieces

There were several other interesting activities at the conference that are worth reporting:

Pre-conference workshop for young scholars. This was an interesting forum where editors of three of the journals in the field discussed with young (or more accurately, new) scholars how to get published.

Book and wine session This informal late evening session provided an opportunity for participants to share their reviews of interesting books. This is an event that could be expanded to cover both ‘classics’ in the field, as well as books on new developments.

Posters There were about a dozen posters. Again, I would like to see more posters at conferences such as this. A well designed poster can be read in a couple of minutes and impart as much if not more information than a 20 minute oral presentation, and can be seen by everyone at the conference, unlike a presentation at a parallel session, some of which, such as the horrible ‘speed-dating’ sessions, resembled having a fire hose of information turned on you – or am I just a visual learner?

Given that so many new people are moving into online and open learning all the time, much more needs to be done at conferences such as this to encourage sessions where prior knowledge and best practices are brought to the attention of new participants.

Conclusions

Overall, this was another excellent conference from EDEN in a wonderful location (it is the first time I have been immersed into Turkish baths). The next one will be next year in Jönköping, southern Sweden.

The University of Guadalajara

I spent last week in and around Guadalajara in the state of Jalisco in Mexico. The Universidad de Guadalajara, whose origins go back to 1586, is the second largest university in Mexico, with about 130,000 students distributed between 15 campuses across the state. It also has a long-standing distance education program, now called Virtual Campus, which offers fully online programs, often through local ‘casas’ or study centres with Internet access (only about 40% of Mexicans, and almost none in the lower socio-economic groups, have Internet access at home, mainly due to lack of competition in the Mexican telephone industry).

I first became associated with UdG (the term used by staff and students) in 1999, when I was on a review team looking at its international activities, but my work with UdG really started in 2004 when they were establishing a Master in Educational Technology which is now still running (Maestría en Tecnologías para el Aprendizaje.) Dr. Patricia Rosas Chavez was instrumental in establishing the MTA at UdG, together with several other UdG staff. I worked with faculty and students on this program in the early days, and as a result I now have many good friends there.

The Agora Project

I was approached about a year ago by Dr. Rosas, who is now the Director, Coordinación de Innovación Educativa y Pregrado at UdG. The university is wanting to initiate a major innovation program for teaching and learning based on mobile learning and social media, which became known as the Agora project, and were looking for consultants. I had no hesitation in recommending Dr. Tannis Morgan, of the Justice Institute of British Columbia, which provides education and training for police, paramedics, fire service and correctional personnel, as well as social, health and community workers. JIBC has a major mobile learning initiative, as most of its students are working and travelling all the time. Tannis pulled together a small team of international consultants to work on the project.

The UdG Agora is the site for the University of Guadalajara Student Centred and Mobile Learning Diploma. The goal of this faculty development program is for UdG professors to confidently integrate student centred and mobile learning strategies and activities into their teaching and students’ learning.

Tannis and her team have done an extremely good job in ‘walking the talk’ with the faculty at UdG. Through the use of practical examples, challenges and experiential learning, the program provides faculty and learners with the tools they need to meaningfully plan, design, implement and share student centred and mobile learning in their courses through a community of practice that fosters the enrichment of student centred learning experiences with the use of mobile learning technologies (iPads).

The program adopts the Agora as a metaphor for an open, collaborative, community where learning happens through interaction and engagement with others. The blended faculty development program ran from July 13-December 17 2015. It began with one week of face-to-face meetings in July, followed by 8 weeks of online work from mid-August to October. It ends with two days of face-to-face meetings in December.

CIINOVApp and Conectáctica

I was asked to participate in two conferences last week organised by UdG to integrate with the final two days of the Agora project.

CIINOVApp (Congreso Internacional de Innovación para el Aprendizaje: Redes y su impacto en el aprendizaje: International Conference on Innovation in Education: Networks and their Impact on Learning) took place at a new campus of UdG in Valle, a largely agricultural community about 90 minutes drive west of Guadalajara. The campus takes pride on being closely linked with the needs of the local community. The conference included both campus faculty and students.

Orozco’s ‘The People and Their False Leaders’ mural in the Auditorium of the University of Guadalajara

Conectácticaimmediately followed, and was aimed at all faculty in the UdG network of campuses. It was a meeting for teachers of the University Network in Jalisco to seek the exchange of experiences, trends and teaching practices that allow innovation, experimentation and implementation in the development of learners. It opened in the Paraninfo, the Auditorium of UdG. It can be seen from the photos that there are two wonderful murals by the great Mexican artist, Orozco, on the cupola and the front wall in the Paraninfo. The rest of the conference was held at the CUADD campus (Centro Universitario de Arte, Arquitectura y Diseño), about 30 minutes north of the centre of Guadalajara.

Orozco’s mural in the cupola of the Auditorium

The conferences took advantage of the Agora consultants (Tannis Morgan, Brian Lamb and Alan Levine) being in town, plus the addition of myself, Cristobal Cobo, formerly of the Internet Institute, Oxford University and now working in Uruguay, Atsusi Hirumi, Professor of Education at the University of Central Florida, and several Mexican speakers. Faculty from UdeG also made short presentations demonstrating how they had applied what they learned from the Agora. These presentations were very interesting and showed how faculty were creatively applying the lessons of the Agora.

My contribution

I gave the opening keynote at both the conferences:

the future of online learning (CIINOVApp)

teaching in a digital age (Conectáctica).

It was the second time I have given a keynote in front of Orozco’s The People and Their False Leaders, with the dramatic images of the ruling class brutally trying (and failing) to break the ordinary man’s desire for learning.

I also ran three two-hour interactive workshops, two on how to decide what to do online and what to do in class in hybrid courses, and one workshop on selecting appropriate media. In each workshop, participants worked in groups, chose a module or course, and made decisions about the use of technology in those courses. All my contributions drew heavily on my book, Teaching in a Digital Age. I also sat on a panel with the other foreign speakers.

This was a pretty intense week, involving four consecutive 12 hour days when the travel across and through Guadalajara’s congested traffic was included, so I was very glad to escape with my wife for the weekend to a resort at Lake Chapala, about two hour’s outside Guadalajara.

However, it was great working both with Mexican colleagues, who are incredibly kind and generous, and so enthusiastic about adopting new methods of teaching, and the foreign consultants, all leaders in educational innovation, and great people to be with.

Reflections

Yes, I know, I’m supposed to be retired, but I wanted to see colleagues and old friends once more. It will be my last time in Mexico in a work capacity, and as I have had such good friends and colleagues there, it seemed a good way to say goodbye.

The visit also reinforced my decision to retire. I was really tired most of the time (working in Mexico always requires a lot of energy), but more importantly I can feel that the future of online learning lies elsewhere, in the work of people like Tannis Morgan, Brian Lamb and Alan Levine, who are on top of the rapid, new developments in technology, and in particular have the energy and creativity to apply these technologies in educationally appropriate and exciting ways.

These conferences reinforced my view that we need to move from (but not ignore) best practices in online learning to doing things differently in ways that exploit the power of social media. Best practices in online learning provide a safe base and certainly need to be a foundation for innovation, but we cannot continue to be restricted by the limitations of learning management systems and lecture capture.

In particular, we need to use technologies that are as free as possible from large corporate interests, maintaining the freedom and independence of education from the forces of Internet corporations. My fear for the future is that education will eventually become privatized through inappropriate and mechanical applications of computer technology (I will be discussing this further in my look forward for 2016 in the new year). Tannis and her colleagues are working to ensure that there are alternatives to corporate, behaviourist online learning. It will be Tannis and other colleagues, and the young faculty and students from places such as Mexico and Africa in particular, who are most likely to drive education in new and appropriate ways based on simple, non-commercial social media, which is why this last week has been so exciting.

DISCLAIMER: The views and opinions expressed by Tony Bates, and all other participants in this blog, are the individual's views and opinions and do not necessarily reflect the views and opinions of Contact North | Contact Nord.